Saguaro Cactus

This is how important the annual saguaro harvest was to the Hohokam and Pima Indians. It paced their lives, defined time, and most importantly, gave them year-long sustenance.

Timing is everything. Arrive too late and the fruit is punctured and cleaned out by birds. Pick too soon and the fleshy innards are hard and bitter. When the fruit bulbs took on a fat, reddish hue, tribal members knocked them from limb tops using a crude tool shaped from saguaro ribs. Volunteers with the Phoenix’s Desert Botanical Garden use basically the same tools today. They gather and freeze the fruit to be used during the year in demonstrations at the garden or they trade the seeds with their counterparts around the world for other exotic varieties.

To the tribes, saguaro fruit was a key ingredient to survival. Along with mesquite beans and cholla buds, they comprised the three stapes of Hohokam and Pima diets. The fruit yielded three types of food: The seeds could be stored indefinitely and used in stews, pastes and tortillas; the pulp could be eaten like a melon; the juice was slow-cooked into a syrup and used for such things as a dip for tortillas and even, on special occasions, wine.

Saguaro Facts

Saguaros are found only in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and Mexico!

Growth varies from 4 to 8 inches a year, depending on weather. A 10-year-old plant may be only a few inches tall.

Mature saguaros can grow up to 45 feet in ideal conditions. The saguaro is the tallest cactus in the United States. It takes a saguaro about 150 years to reach its full height. Fifty years later, it dies.

Saguaros brighten the desert with an outstanding flower display from mid-May though June.

A mature saguaro can be more than 6 tons.

The first arms sprout when the cactus is 40-50 years old.

There are 2,000 seeds in the fruit and saguaros can produce millions of seeds in its lifetime, but only a few will germinate, and only a few of those will survive the first year. Only one may survive to adulthood. The plant also has to be lucky to avoid being dug up or eaten by an insect, bird or rodent.

Some saguaros can produce 200 bulbs of fruit a year.

Saguaros can produce as many as 40 million seeds in a lifetime. Its ribs, called pleats, expand and contract according to the availability of water.

The fruit is usually sweet, almost sugary, depending on ripeness. The numerous small seeds make the pulp crunchy.

Saguaros often have holes in them.Newcomers sometimes think that the cactus hasbeen vandalized with gunshots. Actually, birds are responsible. Gila woodpeckers and gilded flickers carve out nesting sites in saguaros. Then birds such as owls, starlings and sparrows use the abandoned woodpecker nests the following year.

Wildlife won’t harm it if it is healthy and mature.

Some birds, such as cactus wrens and hawks, prefer to make nests outside the saguaro in the juncture of its arms. And the hawks will keep coming back to this nest until that particular nesting pair stops nesting.

Another fascinating thing about saguaros is their individuality. Some have arms, some don’t. Some have many arms, twisting and pointing as if trying to show directions. Scientists don’t really know why saguaros vary so much in their appendage-setting habits.

Pinnacle Peak park’s saguaro in Scottsdale

The rare crested saguaro is an anomaly in the cactus world. These are mature cactuses that begin to grow in a broad fan shape instead of continuing to develop a characteristic long trunk and curving limbs. Botanists don’t know what causes a saguaro to develop a crest. About one in 150,000 saguaros develop this unusual growth.

Landscape saguaros tend to grow faster than desert ones because they’re watered better, which allows them to develop their maximum potential every year. The most common mistake is under-watering landscape saguaros especially during the first five years after delivery when the plants need supplemental water for establishment.

The root system is shallow, but spreads out as far as 100 feet, enabling the plant to draw up quickly even small amounts of rainfall.